Takes on a Plane

Generally I avoid in-flight movies unless I don’t care about the film.  But we just completed a flight home from Italy and because it was our 50thwedding anniversary we treated ourselves to business class…which means we had a monitor about the size of something you could hang in a sports bar. So I indulged in two films I really did care about seeing on a screen somewhat larger than a book cover—Felt, the Man Who Brought Down The White House and Chappaquiddick. Since they were historical political dramas, they seemed to be nice and easy re-introductions to the American political scene, which I had blissfully avoided for almost two weeks. Nonetheless I was immediately struck by the relevance and resonance of both films to the current scene. The Felt film is about Mark Felt, better known as "Deep Throat", a longtime top dog in the FBI who became the stealth source for reporters, especially Woodward and Bernstein, in breaking the Watergate story. And let’s be clear, without Felt’s guidance Woodward and Bernstein rather than going down as legends of journalism go down as two overeager, in-over-their-heads reporters who end up pissing off a lot of people, including their bosses at The Washington Post. Whereas All the President’s Men, the superb 1970’s film on our previous Constitutional crisis, rightly focuses on the nitty-gritty journalistic work necessary to expose Richard Nixon’s full scale chicanery, the Felt film (based on Felt’s own book) brings an overdo balancing of the scales. As I say, the timing is exquisite because Felt’s story is so redolent of what the current cast of FBI agents in the Trump-Russia probe have gone through. James Comey, Andrew McCabe, Peter Strzok have all had their personalities, partisanship, and professionalism challenged as they worked on this high-profile, high-risk, and highly complicated case. In Felt’s case, it all came down on one guy. Like Comey, he was accused of having an inflated sense of self-esteem. Like McCabe whose wife ran for office as Democrat and donated to Hillary Clinton’s campaign, Felt’s integrity was questioned because he was a registered Democrat (as if FBI agents are not allowed the political freedom they’re sworn to protect). And like Strzok, whose text-documented affair with a lawyer for the Justice Department compromised him and ultimately cost him his job, Felt’s personal life intruded on his professional conduct. Felt’s daughter had run off with some unknown far-left group at a time when unknown far-left groups were engaging in violent terrorist activities throughout the country. That only added emotional fuel to Felt’s overweening sense that father knows best…whether it was he as father of a family or J. Edgar Hoover as father of the FBI. As a consequence, Felt issued orders for illegal wire taps and warrantless searches of the homes of domestic radicals for which he was later tried, convicted and ultimately pardoned by Ronald Reagan. So much in the dark were they about Felt’s “Deep Throat” identity and so in awe were they of his lawlessness in going after radicals that Nixon as well as others from his administration appeared as defense witnesses at Felt’s trial in 1980, six years after Felt’s skullduggery had brought them all down.The Chappaquiddick film dramatizes the details of the tragedy of Mary Jo Kopechne, a young, idealistic campaign worker for Bobby Kennedy, who had the great misfortune after Bobby’s death to attend a party for her and her co-workers only to end up drowned after a drunken Ted Kennedy drove his over-bloated car off a very small bridge on a very small island off Martha’s Vineyard. My view of the Chappaquiddick affair was shaped by two things. One was my job at the time as a police reporter for a Connecticut daily paper where I covered more than a few cases that compared in rough outline to Ted Kennedy’s—someone with no priors is involved in an accident which involves an uncertain degree of negligence and the sentence that is handed down comes no where close to the justice a lost life would seem to demand. I suspect cases like Chappaquiddick--again in rough outline--happen in America every weekend, and without involvement of the country’s most famous family and a stake in the American presidency, they pass largely unnoticed. So I never had any practical quarrel with Ted Kennedy’s relatively light sentence. The other thing that influenced me was Robert Sherrill’s book, The Last Kennedy. Sherrill was a sharp, quite leftist writer who drew a devastating portrait of Kennedy’s craven, conniving, possibly criminal and certainly cowardly behavior on the night of the accident. From The New York Time’s review of The Last Kennedy:

Sherrill is more interested in the sequel to Chappaquiddick than in the events of the night of July 18, 1969, themselves. His objective, he says, is not to analyze the evidence in such a way as “to convict Kennedy of anything in particular, but rather to present a case study of how a famous politician-‐by delays, by obfuscation, by propaganda, by all sorts of tricks and wiles‐-can kill somebody under mysterious circumstances and still regularly receive more than 40 percent of the support in Presidential preference polls. That's about as close to a miracle as we are likely to come in these pagan days.”

No need to spell out for the savvy readers who regularly flock to The Nob the parallels in that paragraph to the current situation…all the way down to that baffling 40 percent support for really bad behavior. And so it was on the basis of Sherrill’s book that I was quite convinced that Ted Kennedy was unfit for the Presidency. And as much as I believed that Jimmy Carter was a near failure as a president, I was not at all enthusiastic when Ted “answered the call” to challenge him for the Democratic nomination in 1980. Still, my humanism got the best of me, and I found myself moved by “the dream shall never die” speech Ted delivered at the convention that re-nominated Carter. And although his delivery itself was electrifying, it showed again how much of the Kennedy magic relied on getting Ted Sorenson to write your speeches for you. In any event, over the next 30 plus years I resigned myself to the fact that I was going to be sharing a big piece of the political foxhole I was in with a guy who was—to put it kindly—a flawed human being. During that time Kennedy delivered more often that not, policy-wise. As Donald Rumsfeld aptly put it, you fight with the army you’ve got. Which brings up another instance of Chappaquidick’s relevance to our current situation—our army of the resistance has been sorely depleted as key members are drummed out of the corps for a variety of infractions: Hillary for losing; Comey for moral vanity; McCabe for not having a deep enough throat; Strzok for carelessly mixing business with pleasure...and Al Franken for being in the wrong place in the wrong century. It is another sad commentary on our truly bizarre times that Ted Kennedy could go on national TV back then, make a mea culpa about a dead girl in his car, and ask his electorate to determine if he should stay or go…and yet Al Franken was rushed out the door without ceremony for pretending to “feel up” a girl in a comedy sketch.   Here’s another quote from that New York Times review of The Last Kennedy:  

Sherrill's book is slim; it is cynical; it is open to the accusation of spinning out the Chappaquiddick material at the expense of other relevant aspects of the Senator's character. Yet it is a small, sardonic masterpiece. It is full of anger and compassion: anger that certain things happen in the world, compassion even for those through whom they come. Sherrill faces the worst possibilities about human behavior and specifically the behavior of Edward Kennedy. Yet he finds much to admire in the way Kennedy has reconstructed his life and taken more courageous stances since the disaster. 

Much more than Democrat or liberal, I consider myself a humanist, which means that ultimately I must accept a range of human behaviors as inevitable and tolerable lest I become a man on an island overrun with my own purity. I abhor the modern trend for dismissing people out of hand for the places they come from, the jobs they hold, their religious or political affiliations, their past mistakes or miscalculations, their gender or color of their skin, their tardiness or slow-wittedness in “getting it”. As long as they eventually get it of course. As long as they get that we’re all in this together…that we have certain norms to follow in order to survive as a society…that the untethered, indulged id is the mortal enemy of human community…that flaws are what make us human and bond us together, and denial of our own flaws or unforgiveness of the flaws in others is what makes us alien and a danger to all that exists.